Steampunk Murder Mystery

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Cammeh

The mascot formerly known as Cammytrice
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Reposting this as a new thread, since my last one went down in flames.

So, my premise is this:

Basically, my character is a bit of a chemical engineer/inventor and specialises in fuel additives and sealants, and she's come under suspicion when someone steals one of her formulas and uses it to commit murder. So she goes on a bit of a mission/investigation to clear her name and find the murderer.

This is my character:

Name: Camilla del Bosque

Bio: Camilla del Bosque's family are relative newcomers to the kingdom. Her family's money, resources and charm helped them to quickly establish themselves among the high class of Orhmere. Camilla hopes to make her own impression by developing fuel additives and other compounds to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of steam power. With super-heated steam and special sealants, boilers could be smaller, more powerful. Batteries and electricity so far are big, bulky, unreliable and notoriously inefficient. Steam was already proven, and only needed refining. Her family's coal mining and transport business supports her research, and also her explorations around the world to discover new materials and metals.

She has been nicknamed 'Gatita del Bosque' (Kitten of the Forest) by her family, who equate her to the solitary jaguar. She prefers to be left to her work, but like a kitten, sometimes acts surprisingly playful and friendly. When she's in the mood of course.

Naturally left-handed, her governesses and tutors forced her to learn to write with her right hand. Her own stubbornness not to be outdone, however, she can now write simultaneously with both hands. If she really concentrates, she can write in separate languages with each hand.

She also plays the glass harmonica.

So, I'm basically looking for more ideas on how to develop the story, and what kind of characters/cast we should include.

Discuss.

Also, I have included her first ever post, just to give you a sense of style.

The sound of a hammered dulcimer could be heard over the slight hissing of steam, nudging Camilla awake. She picked her head up and groaned, stretching the kinks out of her back and neck. She'd fallen asleep at her desk again. It was an all-too-common occurrence for her; indeed, she fell asleep just as often at the desk in her workshop as she did in her own bed.

Yawning and rubbing her eyes, Camilla rose and trudged into the water closet of her apartment, which took up half of the third floor in the east wing of her family's estate house. She pulled a lever, which started the bath filling with hot water as she continued through the room into her bedroom, and on into her kitchen where she opened the steam valve for the room, setting her steam staff into action. The main valve fed into individual valves which controlled each machine. By shutting off individual valves and feeding in punched cards detailing recipes, she decided her breakfast for today. Smoked salmon with petit suisse cheese and dill on fresh bread, a soft-boiled egg, marmalade on toast and coffee with cream.

Satisfied with her choices, she returned to her bath, shedding her work dress and minimal night undergarments and depositing them into the laundry chute before climbing into the tub. It took a moment to remove all the pins from her hair before she could relax in the water and begin to clean herself up. She had a meeting later today, and it wouldn't do to look as if she'd slept at her desk.
 
How about the killer (played by me in this instance) is someone your character knows and trusts completely and actually goes with you on the adventure to track down who the killer is and misguides you because they are in fact the killer?
 
interesting. Other than being the murderer, what kind of character is he?
 
He specializes in learning the techniques of others, despite not being able to invent anything of his own, he is able to easily copy someone just by checking over their schematics, watching them build it once and so on and so forth. This led him to try various combinations to see what could work together and what couldn't and led others to come up with more complex ideas to combine the two into a single machine, and then allow him to nick their designs again, furthering his own abilities.

His own creations are entirely indistinguishable from the original creator's.

Despite being good as he is, he gets jealous of people he perceives as better (his sibling is one such person and that would be his victim, which he then frames you on) and harbors great anger towards them.
 
But how would he present himself to her, is my real question. Who would he be on the surface that would make her want to work with him? She'd need to trust him herself, even if he is the victim's brother.
 
Perhaps he befriended her shortly after she came there because he was ambidextrous and met her in a library with him writing with his left hand while reading with his right. And they built their friendship around their love for tinkering even though he wasn't as good at it as her. He was able to ape her but never overtake her in skill, but he stayed close since she arrived simply as a friend.
 
Hmmm...

I'll have to think about it. Not being weird or difficult about it, but to be true to her character, she's not much of a 'buddy-friendly' type person. Like I said in her profile, she's very solitary. She might see him as an intellectual peer or a rival. Especially being a woman, she is very serious, driven and focused on her work, and jealously guards her formulae and methods.
 
Curious. I'd like to develop a close frenemy with the character -- try my hand at sexual tension. And by try, I really do mean try, since I'm rather inexperienced. The character concept I have is some sort of aristocratic military man who was dismissed because of physical troubles (I'm thinking missing a limb), and turned to naturalism (the time of Darwin!) for work. Well, naturalism and secret magical shit (the time of Waite!). And his relation to Camilla is that he met her on a mutual adventure (him studying, say, finches, and her looking around for plants), then moved somewhere close to her home to further his research or something, so that he has plenty of opportunities to both assist and annoy lady protagonist.
 
2 questions: Who's Waite? And, why would she be searching for plants? The rest of the idea has merit. I could see them socialising at intellectual society dinner parties and such. And someone whom she could mutually needle yet never really get 'chummy' with would be her sort of acquaintance.
 
Interesting. It'd be more likely as well if he had a prosthetic that he'd allow her to modify/improve (especially if it had some kind of internal boiler/clockwork mechanism for her to actually improve on).
 
Yes, surely. Perhaps his left hand is gone -- and one of the conceits is that its adjustment is never right, so that when he has to handle specimens (or clues), they either slip away, or get crushed.
 
Hm, we'd have to see what she can improve with that, bc she's not a mechanical engineer, though she would probably be able to draw up plans and such. She wouldn't be interested in doing the actual fabrication.
 
I'm super interested in this, if it becomes a thing. I'm thinking of a tall, slightly off-putting funeral director as a character. Perhaps someone whose actions and mannerisms may lead someone into thinking that he may be the murderer. Other than that, I can't really think of much for a character.
 
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